by Karen Chance
“Yes!” Radu looked smugly at Marlowe. “Yes, he was. And naturally, as soon as we found out, we put together a task force to go after him. But our enemies had expected that and laid a trail full of red herrings in all directions, requiring us to field numerous teams. Like the one you were on.”
“I was on a team?” I asked, because I usually work alone. And because I didn’t recall that at all.
Radu nodded. “You know how it is these days. No one is allowed to go anywhere alone, particularly not for something like this. And Lawrence was assigned to you.”
“Then why not ask him what happened?” I asked, afraid that I already knew the answer.
“Because he’s dead,” Marlowe said savagely. “They’re all dead. Eleven fucking senior masters were sent out and exactly none came back. We found them hacked to pieces, those we got to before the sun took care of them. Butchered—every single one.” Brown eyes bored into mine. “Everyone except you.”
Chapter Six
I just sat there, stunned, while Claire lit into the chief spy. “What are you implying?”
“I’m not implying anything,” Marlowe told her, his eyes never leaving mine. “I am stating it outright. Eleven masters and one dhampir went out, and only the dhampir returned. And I want to know why.”
“You know why.” The voice was Louis-Cesare’s, from the doorway. I didn’t know how long he’d been standing there, but apparently it had been long enough, judging by his expression.
“No, I do not!” Marlowe said, turning on him. “I know how she got out of that hellhole. I don’t know how she got in, or why. They kill Lawrence, someone with knowledge of the inner workings of my family, of the intelligence department, of the Senate itself, yet leave a dhampir alive?”
Angry dark eyes swerved back to mine, but I didn’t respond because I was trying to comprehend that ridiculous number. “Eleven?” I repeated, certain I’d heard wrong.
“Kit is exaggerating,” Mircea told me. “But only slightly. Most were found as he said, although two teams remain missing. But they did not report in and no one can contact them, including their former masters.”
And that wasn’t good. Mental communication within a family was a given, even after a Child reached a high enough status to be emancipated from his master’s control. Their makers should have been able to reach them—if there was anything left to reach.
“By ‘senior masters’ you mean what?” I asked, still trying to wrap my head around it.
“None under second level. Most were first.”
I just stared. “No.”
“I didn’t believe it either,” Radu said quietly. “When they told me. It just seemed…” He trailed off with a flutter of his hand, because he didn’t have adequate words for it.
Unfortunately, someone else did.
“Seems what?” Claire asked, looking around, obviously confused. “It’s a tragedy, yes, but we’re only talking about eleven—”
Marlowe made a retching sound, like someone had just kicked him in the stomach, probably because he couldn’t attack her.
“Claire,” I said. Provoking him right now was not a good idea. Not that I thought she would deliberately do that—she was normally far more sensitive to others’ feelings than I was. But Marlowe was likely to take it that way. If brown eyes could burn, his were doing it.
But Claire either didn’t notice or didn’t understand. “But eleven men—”
“Not men,” I told her, as Radu moved to Marlowe’s side. “Senior masters.”
“And that makes a difference?”
“I…Yes,” I said helplessly, because trying to explain would take too long and I wanted to get back to the point.
But that clearly wasn’t happening.
Something cracked, loud as a gunshot, and I jumped, before I realized it was the counter under Marlowe’s hands. “Tell her,” he said harshly.
“I don’t think—”
“Tell her!”
I glanced at Mircea, who didn’t see it because his eyes were on the chief spy. Like his brother’s hand, which had slipped onto Marlowe’s shoulder. Probably in case he lost his shit and tried to go for Claire across the table.
Not that that was likely. He wasn’t an idiot, and despite appearances, he didn’t really suffer from a lack of impulse control. He was just furious. And only one thing caused that kind of impotent rage in a senior master.
“Lawrence was one of yours,” I guessed.
There was no spoken acknowledgment; Marlowe looked like he might be past it at this point. But his head jerked down in a half nod. And at least a few things started to make sense.
I glanced at Claire, who had figured out that she’d stepped in it, but wasn’t sure how. “Senior masters are like…supernatural tanks,” I told her, even though it was a lousy analogy. In a contest between the two, the tank would be toast. “They have abilities that are hard to explain—”
“I know what vampires can do,” she said quietly.
“No. You really don’t.” I glanced around, but no one was stopping me—or helping, and this wasn’t exactly easy to explain. The basics, yes, but conveying the scale…It was like trying to describe a trillion dollars. Newscasters threw that number around all the time, but it was hard to get a grip on it—until you were standing in the middle of a city block hip-deep in hundred-dollar bills.
“You know how a master vamp is stronger than a regular one, right?” I finally asked.
“Of course.”
“A lot stronger.”
“Yes.”
“Well, take that difference, and increase it by an exponential amount, every time a master goes up a level. It’s not just a step higher, it’s…a different world,” I said, floundering, because there really was no way to convey the difference.
But Claire seemed to understand something, because her eyes narrowed. “You’re saying that—what’s the next to lowest level of master? Sixth?”
I nodded.
“You’re saying that a sixth-level master compared to a seventh is like a seventh-level compared to someone like…like Ray?”
“Hey!” Drifted in from the hall.
“No,” I told her, biting my lip. “Ray is a master—”
“As hard as that is to believe,” Radu murmured.
“—he’s just not a very good one.”
“Okay, that’s enough!” Ray said, appearing in the doorway. And then dodging out again shouting, “Shit, shit!”
Claire looked after him, frowning slightly. Clearly, he was messing with the tidy little box in her mental file labeled VAMPIRE, which wasn’t supposed to contain anything quite that pathetic. “Okay, so it would be like comparing a seventh-level to a regular old vampire?”
I thought about it, and decided that was actually pretty close. “Something like that.”
“So each level…” Claire wrinkled her forehead. “It’s like they’re strong enough to be a master to the next level down?”
“That depends on the individual. Power varies a lot within levels, even before you get to first—”
“And what happens at first?”
“It isn’t really a level. It’s more a catchall for anyone who’s too powerful to fit into the system anymore. It basically means, well—”
“Really, really powerful.”
“Yes.”
“So these masters you sent out last night, you’re saying they were the equivalent of what? Eleven war mages?”
Louis-Cesare snorted.
Claire frowned.
“More like eleven armies,” I said, since she was looking at me.
“Then why are they dead? If they were so strong—”
“That is the question,” Mircea said, cutting Kit off, who had been about to say something rude, by the look of him. “We not only sent some of our best agents, but we sent them in pairs, with each selected to complement the other’s strengths and weaknesses. They were ordered to locate Varus and then to call for assistance, if need be, from a group of
additional operatives we had standing by. No one called.”
“Then whatever happened, happened fast,” I said, thinking about a vampire’s lightning reflexes.
Mircea nodded. “I would assume a trap or snare, although there are few that would be sufficient. And our people have been trained to recognize and avoid those. But even if I am able to accept that both operatives on a team forgot their training, or were somehow overwhelmed in another way, I cannot believe it for all six! Nor can I account for why none of them managed to send a warning.”
And yet, he was going to have to, I realized. Mircea was in charge of coordinating the Senate’s anti-smuggling crusade, which drew assistance from other senators’ families. Other senators who were probably already demanding to know what had happened to their people. And if he couldn’t tell them…Well, I didn’t actually know what would happen if he couldn’t tell them, but I doubted it would be anything good.
I wondered what he planned to do about it.
“If they didn’t send a warning, how did you know Dory was in trouble?” Claire asked.
“I didn’t.” Mircea glanced at Louis-Cesare.
“I heard her scream, in my mind,” he said briefly. “It was cut off, almost immediately, but the voice was unmistakable. I knew approximately where she was from the last time her team had reported in, and was able to track her from there.”
“But I thought you couldn’t…not unless she was—” Claire looked at me, the frown growing. “I thought you weren’t taking that stuff anymore.”
There was no need to ask what “stuff” she meant, since there was only one thing that ramped up my mental abilities. It also helped to control my fits, but so did living with a magical null like Claire. And the wine had a lot of other side effects, like decreasing my edge in battle, that had me worried.
I hadn’t worked out a long-term solution yet, like what I was going to do when she went back to Faerie. But my usage lately had gone way, way down. Too much so to explain how Louis-Cesare had been able to tune into my brain like a freaking shortwave radio.
“I am not able to read your mind,” he said, reading my mind.
“What the hell!”
“But when you are in trouble, you project—”
“Not halfway across a city!”
“I was not halfway across a city,” he said calmly. “I was leading the response team, which meant I was in Manhattan—”
“Okay, not across two miles, then!”
I didn’t know why I was so upset, but suddenly it felt like the walls were closing in. I abruptly stood up, even though there was zero chance of going anywhere until they were finished with me. But it was like Marlowe and the counter; he’d had to crack it or someone’s skull, and I had to move—now—or run screaming down the road like Ray.
Stinky snarled and spit in my arms, not because I was squeezing him too tight but because he was trying to get away. We had a lot in common, and he wanted to sink his teeth into somebody. Fey are formidable pretty much from the day they’re born, as far as I can tell, but while he couldn’t really hurt anyone in this group, the reverse wasn’t true.
“It’s okay,” I told him, stroking his soft baby hair, but I wasn’t sure who I was talking to—him or me.
“It is not ‘okay.’ You are upset,” Louis-Cesare said, undoing whatever soothing qualities Stinky had imparted.
“Stop doing that!”
“I do not need to read your mind to know that, Dorina. You are backing away—”
“I am not!” I said, right before my butt bumped into the counter. “And how do I know you aren’t?”
“Because I have just told you. And what difference would it make if I was? Why are you angry?”
“Maybe I don’t like someone messing around in my head!”
“Messing around?” His forehead knitted.
“For God’s sake!” He ran into English problems at the most convenient times. “It means—”
“I know what it means. What I do not understand is why it is a problem.”
“Why?” I just stared at him. “Why wouldn’t it be? Would you want me doing it to you?”
“I would not care,” he said, and actually looked like he meant it. “And in any case, it has happened before—”
“Rarely! And not at will!”
“—and you do not need to do it to me. You have my memories. All of them.”
I blinked, because I hadn’t realized he knew about that. A metaphysical accident had resulted in a colossal info dump shortly after I met him—four hundred years of Louis-Cesare’s memories straight into mine. I hadn’t wanted them, hadn’t asked for them, didn’t want them now. I just didn’t know how to get rid of them.
I also didn’t know why he was just standing there like it was no big deal. If anything, he looked impatient, as if I was the one being weird here. He also looked like he wanted an answer, which was a little hard because I wasn’t sure what the question was.
“That’s…different,” I finally said.
“How so?”
“That was an accident. And anyway, I never look at your memories.”
“I know that you do not.”
I took a second to yank Stinky back, who was still trying to scratch out the eyes of this strange creature who had offended me. “And how do you know that, if you’re not in my head?”
“You did not know about Christine,” he said, referring to the revenant who had landed him in his current mess. “You had my memories, all of them, at your fingertips. Yet you did not recognize her when you saw her.”
And for some crazy reason, he looked almost insulted by that.
“They’re your memories,” I said, like I somehow needed to point this out. “I don’t have the right—”
“You do,” he said, coming toward me.
“I do not.”
“I give it to you freely—”
“I don’t want it!” I said, and my back hit the door.
Louis-Cesare stopped. For a moment we just looked at each other. And then he frowned.
“I was surprised,” he finally said, “when I realized the truth. But I assumed it was due to your fear of intimacy—”
“I don’t have a fear of intimacy!”
“—or your lack of desire for intimacy with me. But when you demonstrated that that was not the case—”
Claire made a little sound, whether of outrage or sympathy I couldn’t tell.
“—naturally I wondered why you had not attempted to know me better. At the time, I put it down to living with humans and their secretive ways.”
“Better than the reverse,” Claire muttered, and tried to take Stinky, probably to leave my hands free in case I wanted to choke a certain vampire.
But I held on. Stinky’s less-than-perfect social skills were keeping Louis-Cesare at arm’s length. And right now, that was where I wanted him.
“But now I am forced to conclude that perhaps I was right in the beginning,” he said stiffly. “Despite not objecting to physical intimacy—”
“Shut. Up,” I begged, but of course he didn’t. Vampires didn’t have the same concept of privacy that humans did, and Louis-Cesare had obviously kept things bottled up as long as he was going to.
“—you do not wish anything more substantive than that. Or am I wrong?”
He stood there, arms crossed, blue eyes flashing. Completely oblivious to the audience, not one of whom was looking away or even pretending to mind his own business. Radu even looked like he might be taking mental notes.
“We’re not talking about this now,” I said, suppressing an impulse to grind my teeth.
“Then when?”
“Some other time! Right now we’re talking about you picking something out of my brain that you shouldn’t have been able to hear.”
“I naturally assumed it was because you had recently ingested fey wine,” Louis-Cesare said. His expression made it clear that this wasn’t over.
“She doesn’t do that anymore,” Claire sai
d, glaring at him. Somehow she and I had ended up on one side of the room and the vampires on the other, a fact that was not lost on Louis-Cesare.
The frown tipped into a scowl. “Of course she does. Although I see no reason why it should concern you.”
“It concerns me because I’m her friend! And it’s dangerous!”
“And that has stopped Dorina when?” he demanded.
“Can we get back to the part about you reading my mind?” I asked, because this was veering into dangerous territory. “You say you can’t, but a week ago you heard me all the way from Chinatown, and you were in Brooklyn.”
I’d gotten involved in a dustup courtesy of Ray, and Louis-Cesare had come to help out. At the time, I’d been grateful. Of course, at the time I’d also been drunk off my ass, which didn’t lead to great decision making.
“Which is my point,” he said impatiently. “You had imbibed a large amount of fey wine that evening, which increased your mental abilities—”
“And that’s my point, because I hadn’t had any last night!”
“If you cannot recall last night, how do you know?”
Because I knew what the level had been in the bottle this morning. I didn’t say, not needing that kind of hell. “Like Claire said, I don’t do that anymore,” I said sweetly.
He narrowed his eyes at me, but before he could say anything, Marlowe, of all people, came to my rescue.
“I have a squad of dead agents,” he said harshly. “And a live dhampir. And I have yet to hear why.”
“It is apparent why,” Louis-Cesare said, his eyes on mine. “We have been pressing the smugglers harder of late, and they have decided to strike back. The more operatives they deprive us of, the longer it will take—”
“Then why leave her? In the right circumstances, she’s as dangerous as another master. In some even more so, as she has abilities we lack!”
And that, I thought, was likely the closest thing to a compliment I would ever get from Marlowe.
Not that I was all that flattered when the next thing out of his mouth was: “They should have spilled her guts all over the pier, right beside Lawrence’s!”
“Typical!” Claire said, looking disgusted. Louis-Cesare apparently didn’t like the comment any better, because his face flushed and he rounded on the chief spy. But then Radu intervened.
